Bread Tales

Sunday, September 11, 2011

Cucumber-Basil Egg Salad

I have a certain penchant for egg salad. My mother would rarely make it, but, oh goodness, when she did...
Heaven.
Eggy, mayonnaise-y, heaven.
I rarely make it myself, particularly after I saw just how much mayo went into it. Also, after years of bad deli experiences, my longing for it fizzled and slowly died.
But then I found myself with a bunch of hard boiled eggs on my hands. In a fit of "hardboiling" for the "Fish and Broad Bean Salad" recipe, I had boiled an entire carton of eggs and I was left with many many hard boiled leftovers with little to do with them.
If there was ever a time to justify egg salad...
But my fears about mayo overdose remained and so I trawled the internet searching for an egg salad that downplayed the white stuff and front-loaded other ingredients.
And Epicurious.com came to my rescue. Their recipe for an egg salad infused with cucumber and basil seemed exactly what I was looking for. Yes, it still called for 1/2 cup of mayonnaise, but I could work with this. After a little tweaking, I found myself in the possession of a fresh "healthier" version of egg salad that was absolutely phenomenal. Enough mayo had gone into the recipe to evoke memories of the mayo-drenched creations of my past, but supplementing some of the mayo with yogurt, plus the addition of cucumber, basic, and celery, gave it a much more refined feeling.

This recipe may not satisfy everyone's yen for egg salad (after all, I ended up only putting 3 eggs into it), but for me, it was the perfect balance.